Ba Da Jung

Period

This project is created for the "Contemporary Painting" class. This painting is an abstract mixed media work using sanitary pads. The red jewelry I found in Reuse Depot reminded me of my childhood. When I was young in Korea, my parents gave me a red ruby necklace with a huge party to celebrate my first menstruation. The celebration was held to keep up with trends abroad in a relatively culturally and socially conservative country compared to the West, which made me even more embarrassed and confused. For women, menstruation is a necessity, not a choice, and a responsibility to spend decades together. I wanted to express the continuous controversial harmfulness of sanitary pads, responsibility for menstruation, and stress. This work is personal, and at the same time, it says my mixed feelings, such as the social and cultural position of women I have experienced and the pain, responsibility, and stress that menstruation causes women.Eventually, I created four analogue collages, and in this project, I experimented with how differently I could express my collages on the same subject through various mediums and flows. Overall, the lump of menstrual blood and the dropping texture is clearly shown through the blue colors that contrast with menstrual blood. Baking soda, Floetrol, Glue, Metal Powder, and Acrylic were used in the project, and absorbents (cotton) of sanitary pads were all used in all collages.